Let's hear it for disapprobation It's better than censure or condemnation, It trumps reproof or accusation Or disapproval or damnation It's sure to be the next sensation You just can't beat disapprobation

It is clear to me, Sir Hack, that you have never done much meditation of the sort taught by the Temple. Therefore you know not of those things of which we speak, and are, therefore, below the curve, around the bend, and severely missing the point. I see dark hues in your spiritual aureola, from which I conclude that you do NOT suck...much, anyway.

Thanks to my iPhone I have recently had the unanticipated delight of reading all of:

Crome Yellow Call of the Wild Candide Daisy Miller Flatland The Hound of the Baskervilles The Jungle Book Maggie, A Girl of the Streets Miss Lulu Bett Siddhartha The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and I have many more such delights ahead, having just embarked on the remarkable tale of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Well, now I have finished Lord Fauntleroy, and I am sorry to have done. If I were not finished with it, I would still have the pleasure of reading it some more, you see, but now I don't But that is all right. I shall have another book to read tomorrow.

I think Henry James would say they should have tuned to a different channel. Some people don't know how many channels the imagination can receive when allowed to run free through the memesphere. Some spend their whole day surfing through three channels only. Others live their lives tuned to only one. Others fritter their days away jumping back and forth among over 100 channels, including high-def, 3D, technicolor, ultraviolet, 6-D, x-ray vision, the Spook channel, NDE, OOBE, and transcendental proliferation.

Yeah, I did, Amos. But now I want to wear really loud sports jackets, flash the "thumbs-up" sign, and shoot my mouth off on Hockey Night in Canada 3 times a week....plus make a fortune autographing pictures of me and my dog "Blue"....

What Kotschick actually SAID was the they had prove that a rational linear combination of Chern numbers is an oriented diffeomorphism invariant of smooth complex projective varieties if and only if it is a linear combination of the Euler and Pontryagin numbers.

In dimension at least three, they further proved that only multiples of the top Chern number, which is the Euler characteristic, are invariant under diffeomorphisms that are not necessarily orientation-preserving. These results solve a long-standing problem of Hirzebruch's. He also claimed to determine the linear combinations of Chern numbers that can be bounded in terms of Betti numbers. This remains to be demonstrated.

(A diffeomorphism is an isomorphism of smooth manifolds. It is an invertible function that maps one differentiable manifold to another, such that both the function and its inverse are smooth.)

(Chern classes are characteristic classes. They are topological invariants associated to vector bundles on a smooth manifold. If you describe the same vector bundle on a manifold in two different ways, the Chern classes will be the same. When are two ostensibly different vector bundles the same? When are they different? These questions can be quite hard to answer. But the Chern classes provide a simple test: if the Chern classes of a pair of vector bundles do not agree, then the vector bundles are different. (The converse is not true, though.))

(The Betti number of a topological space is, in intuitive terms, a way of counting the maximum number of cuts that can be made without dividing the space into two pieces. This defines, in fact, what is called the first Betti number. the Euler characteristic (or Euler-Poincaré characteristic) is a topological invariant, a number that describes a topological space's shape or structure regardless of the way it is bent. The Pontryagin class lies in cohomology groups with index a multiple of four. It applies to real vector bundles.)

See, I thoughtfully provided informal definitions to make the whole matter clearer...

Okay, I read the Wikipedia article on Don Cherry and I have this to say:

Oh fer God's sake, Little Hawk! A fuckin' television HOCKEY commentator, and I'm supposed to be impressed? Considering that (A) I don't watch television, (B) I hate sports, and (C) I hate hockey more than most sports, why in the name of Christ on a cracker would I entertain any positive thoughts toward a TV hockey guy, particularly one whose politics and overall style seem to be diametrically opposed to my own? There's absolutely NOTHING about the guy that would endear him to me in any way! Hell, he doesn't even have a REAL beard, just one of those half-inch goatees! Phooey!

Actually, no. I've passed Henry on to a colleague at work who already has tamed a couple of tree frogs and an anole. Trying to convince him, however, to not house Henry with the anole, who is not quite as big as the beetle and could possibly get gored. We are now on a hunt for a female so he will have a breeding pair.

In captivity, one feeds them ripe, juicy fruits such as peaches and pears.

Did you know Hercules Beetles are the strongest animals in the world? Gentle Giants.

I watched another tarantula dragged across the yard by another tarantula hawk today. This one took the long way round, perhaps trying to avoid dragging on grass by detouring to the paved driveway, but the trip back over to my neighbor's shrubbery where she apparently was going to stash her prey was longer across a different patch of grass than just hoofing it straight down the turf where she bagged the spider.